This gadget does exactly as promised: it looks like a thumbdrive (sort of) and fries the circuitry of any computer it’s plugged into. It’s made from camera flash parts, is charged with a standard AA battery, and delivers a 300V zap of DC destruction to the port for all your USB-murdering needs. Note that this […]

The Cobham catalog, exposed by The Intercept, features countless pages of surveillance gadgets sold to U.S. police to spy on American citizens: tiny black boxes with a big interest in you. In the creepily bland feature lists and nerdy product names is a whisper of a dark future; perhaps darker than anyone can imagine.

This image depicts the most commonly-found stylesheet colors on the web’s top sites—Paul Hebert did an amazing amount of analysis and this is just one of the intriguing visualizations he came up with. Most of these are obvious staples, especially HTML red and blue, though it’s interesting how far the blue “cluster” is from the […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

Holiday shopping is in full swing, and the Striiv Touch is one of the best gift ideas I’ve landed on. Its simple design works for females and males, and its wide range of features makes it suitable for even the non-fitness enthusiasts in your life.Unlike traditional fitness trackers, the Striiv Touch also acts as a smartwatch. It […]

Fair enough. I have the opposite problem. When we moved into the apartment I had to buy a new fridge in order to fit the fridge niche. Now I can’t even open the doors 180 degrees to slide out shelves, etc. It makes cleaning the fridge a much harder job, but for every day purposes it still works fine.

I also installed a lot of racks to add extra storage space. Magnettic racks for knives, cooking utensils, etc and simple sturdy shelves for saucepans, frying pans to sit on and hang from next to the stove. When i’m cooking I don’t like having to dig into a cupboard and rummage around finding stuff. Much better if I can just see them.

Upon further review I withdraw my remarks ;) Actually, now that I had a bit of a think about it, storing soups and chilis in mason jars isn’t a terribly great idea, as you can’t get the right mix of liquid and non-liquid bits.

Sadly, though, I don’t have enough pots to chuck one in the fridge, so I use large-ish Pyrex resealables.

Hey, this might be obvious to you and me, but for every obvious thing there’s probably around a billion people who never got the idea. If we stopped treating explaining useful but obvious things as silly, maybe a lot of people would learn some useful stuff.

Amount of tiny silly things about cleaning up, for example, or using plastic boxes to control bathroom chaos, are stuff I learned from my girlfriend long time ago. Ridiculously shamefully obvious, in retrospect, yet I didn’t know about them.

The proper thing to do is to put everything in one bag, and do two random drawings a day: first, the things you’ll wear this day, second, the things you’ll wash this day. As a bonus you’ll get exciting surprise clothing combinations.

And sometimes I wash them twice between wearings. OK, granted, that’s because my house is so old I occasionally suffer vermin infestation in the closet, and have to wash everything again after I kill off the clothes moths. So that probably doesn’t count.

I think it’s interesting that there’s “work clothes”, meaning clothes you wear to your job that you keep clean and nice-smelling, but there’s also “work clothes”, meaning clothes that you wear when you know whatever you’re wearing is going to be destroyed, like for changing the oil in the tractor during a downpour or machining receiver slides by hand. If you’re a farmer, the two categories are the same, but if you’re a clerk, they are opposites.

Enriched with flash powder. First you make bread out of it. Give it to your friend in a sandwich, then surreptitiously touch it with a lit cigarette and *FLASH*, he’s hold meat and fixings in his hand in a bedazzled stupour. Baking with the flour can be a little problematic though.

Keep watching, it will get more and more stupid. But really, it’s like this guy doesn’t know how people in high-humidity environments live. In Hawai’i, we had to put anything that is crunchy or powdery into an airtight container so it would stay that way. My grandparents in Indiana would put grains of rice in the salt shakers. There’s nothing new about ‘flour in mason jars’ –shit, I put ganja in my mason jars! C’mon BB… let’s try to stay on target.

If you go to Technician 775’s YouTube page, he also shows you how to store rice in used, cleaned plastic pop bottles! Gracious me! Next, we’ll learn how to carefully store shoes in brand repurposed shoe-boxes. Nike CAN go into an old Adidas box after all!

I’m fairly certain that the main point of this post and video is not that you can store things in jars per se. How to create a good seal, how to ensure that the flour doesn’t oxidize, and that one Mason jar’s worth of flour is about the right amount for a loaf of bread all seem like useful pieces of information.

I store lots of things in jars, and some still spoil after a while. Perhaps if I took the time to learn how to do prepare my jars properly, my food would stay better longer. I’ll tell you that watching videos on the internet that show proper techniques is a whole lot more useful than trial and error with little more than the knowledge that “jars store things—duh.”

The idea that you can put anything in a mason jar is hardly new to people who can. The real value of this video, to me, was the concept that the oxygen absorber would cause a vacuum that would seal the jar without having to water-bath process it.

I use coffee cans for small amounts of flour/meal/seeds/beans. Shatterproof and lightproof, and relatively airtight. Also easier to ground, so you don’t have to worry about static. I find that if I eat breads with too high a static charge, I don’t get good cell phone reception for a couple days.

As someone who lives in the Southern part of the US where canning is practically a right of passage…a Mason jar doesn’t have a set size.

Are we talking pint? quart? 1.5 pint? I’d think wide mouth would make it easier.
(OH wait there it was at 4:45 – quart jars.)

The thing I am most curious about is if the lids are reusable. Since he is not actually “canning” the wax ring might still be intact enough to be reused. That and if the lids aren’t reusable why not go with that food saver vacuum packer he’s got sitting there? He could even pre mix his bread dough and just bag it per loaf.

(and for someone who has a screen name of “technician” I find the lack of stereo sound disappointing.)

Not meaning to sound snarky or anything, but has anybody used actual wax rings in the last 50 years? I thought everyone had switched to reusable rubber rings?

All of those quart jars seems to be a serious waste of space to me though. What’s wrong with a couple of 2-gallon zip lock bags to hold that entire bag of flour? Easy enough to squeeze out the excess air after each use, and you can still throw in the oxygen absorbers for good measure.

This is why I never watch videos in which people show how to do simple things. Reading: “Put the flour in jars. Use oxygen absorbers to keep the flour fresh” takes me maybe 2 seconds. Why should I spend 150 times as much time to see the thing done?

Funny…..I just had to do that yesterday when making bread. Later in the day, while making something else, I realized that the reason my usual bread recipe wasn’t the right consistency (unexpected…we don’t have atmospheric reasons to adjust recipes in Chicago) was because I’d used the wrong flour. Duh.

I’m not impressed when a professional cookbook gives me some wishy-washy instruction like that. Give the actual measurement, then explain why it might need to be tweaked. Otherwise, I might as well use one of my grandpa’s recipes….which I pull out because I love to feel close to him while I make his recipes, but I NEVER use his measurements because they seem designed to ensure you will never make the dish as well as he did.

Pshaw, everyone *knows* you store excess flour in tiny little bags, or dry latex condoms, or balloons, after dividing up the portions with a razor blade and a large mirror and weighing them on a scale. Silly Internets!

If you’re using a bread machine, and you have a consistent recipe for your bread, why not just put the measured amount of flour, sugar, salt, milk powder, and any other dried ingredients (Not the yeast!), and put that all in one jar? Then, all you have to do is dump the contents of the jar, your wet ingredients (oil, butter, water, milk, cheese) and your yeast, and you’re done.

Beware of storing whole wheat flour this way. Wheat flour contains the wheat germ and has a high amount of oil in it. The oil can turn rancid and ruin the flour. I normally store wheat flour in the freezer.

For white flour (and pretty much every other dry good like pasta and rice) I started storing them in mason jars because it keeps pests out (india moths and mice primarily).